The fact that the guy with $1.4M salary and a corporate jet didn't even attempt any innovations in a small, inexpensive experimental store just shows that big companies != capitalism.
Actually, it shows that (big companies != innovation). Big Box retail is profitable by following the formula.
Also, small companies are not necessarily better at innovation. A one storefront company would probably go out of business in the face of outside disruptive innovations, E-Commerce in this case. Those that survive probably didn't need to adapt, e.g. boutique shops whose original formula stressed customer service, etc.
Bugger that. I think we should have the death penalty for (Attempted) suicide.
(On another note, how would you propose to punish people under the age of 18 who attempt to kill themselves?)
On second though those that "attempt" suicide are looking for attention. So if you make the punishment for attempted suicide capital punishment, that gets rid of annoying people while not punishing people who genuinely want to kill themselves but are to stupid to.
Belladonna is a plant too. It doesn't change the fact that it's deadly. Opium and Coca are plants too. That doesn't make them harmless. Drug abuse and addiction harms not just individuals, but entire families, and the rest of society.
Beer and (another addictive, carcinogenic plant:) tobacco are not safer. They should be restricted More, and that's gradually happening to smokers, worldwide.
Just what are you suggesting we do about the problem with drug abuse and addiction?
People should be allowed to do harm to themselves. People should be allowed to smoke in public. The government should not interfere. Now if a corporation wants to not hire people that smoke or drink, that is perfectly ok. If the government want to outlaw drunk driving, that is ok because you are causing great immediate harm. You don't have to go to the bar, and walking past someone smoking a cigarette will not cause significant harm. (Attempted) suicide should not be a crime for people over the age of 18
I currently don't have health insurance because I quite my corporate job to be a contractor for a few months. If I got injured, and die due to lack of medical care, I deserve to die. I never finished college. If no one will hire me as a result, I deserve to literally starve to death. I would accept private charity, but would chose death over welfare. I drink and occasionally smoke cigars. I will not blame anyone for liver cancer.
The government needs to not deal with these problems. Private charities should. If charities can not raise enough money to help you, you do not deserve help. I am being callous here, but it is necessary to keep the government small.
Please expound on this--I've never heard this particular accusation, and I would like to know more. Since you've already been labeled troll, I need to state that I'm serious about wanting to know more. Reliable sources please.
The accusations are untrue. However it was a popular urban legend. A debunking of the list is available here. I never believed he killed any of those people. My only point in making the statement was I don't think Bush has ever been accused of having someone shot, except of course as a matter of war. Clinton has, although unjustly. However, accepting an urban legend as true, is better than making up some baseless accusation.
Now I could be wrong, there could have been rumors of mysterious deaths related to Bush, but I've yet to hear them.
Nah, this isn't Bushe's fault, it dosn't involve shooting someone...
Uh, Clinton was the one who's political enemies had a tendency to die mysteriously. You may accuse Bush of being a war monger, and even big brother, but he's not one to have domestic political enemies shot.
If you are having this much doubt about what you want to do, for Gods sake, get OUT of IT.
It seems like the person likes many facets of IT and his problem is what to specialize in. How would entering another field, expanding his choices, be a good thing?
Of course, considering your lack of direction, you may not be the best person to run a business. Perhaps you should stick to help desk.
Some people are really bad with coming up with an original idea, but if given a task clear but broad task like "Write a Wiki like system that the outlook and excel crowd would use." can come up with a proposal, and given proper manpower and budget, can pull the task off. Then again, some people have a million great ideas but can't make them happen. Thats why a company should have a captain and a helmsman. Someone should say, "Set course for ". . . Engage", and someone should else should chart the course.
Well, at least the dogs should not get addicted to plastics, like the drug sniffing dogs...
I know you're joking, but this comment is also in response to the "Won't dogs get cancer sniffing chemicals?" question. The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off. They are trained to notice certain smells, but they inhale everything equally. Bomb sniffing dogs were inhaling drugs long before they were trained to detect them, and both drug and bomb dogs have been inhaling these chemicals since they were put in action.
So are veterinarians on Slashdot able to answer this? In general, do airport dogs, or any other group of law enforcement trained scent finding dogs, tend to get different sicknesses than the general population of dogs of the same breed? I would think that state and municipal dogs tend to get more variety in their environment. Howerver, dogs assigned to railroad and airport security details tend to breath air from the same mostly closed system day in and day out. If they tend to get lung cancer or other diseases, it might indicate airports and train stations are not healthy places to work either.
Well, but to me at least graph theory and cryptograpy are purely mathematical that happen to be very useful for CS. Algorithm analysis is mostly mathmatical as well but at least it is completely focused on CS. Somebody else mentioned quantum computing, but that seems to be more about physics than CS.
When I think about CS I think about things like microkernels or clockless processor architectures (although the latter is partly electronics of course). So I was wondering what examples others could come up with.
A real computer scientist would never write in anything less portable than a number 2 pencil. I'm sure you've heard that before. The saying implies that computer scientists are just mathematicians that use computers to model there data.
I read about this back in November, and it was known even in 2005. How many people's lives were affected in the interim due to slow news sources?
Did you ever think the red cross was deciding whether or not this study had merit. The people that take CPR have a minimal of medical training. Literally, a couple of hours. They,including myself, should probably due as their training said and stick to the 15 to 1 comporession to breathing ratio or the 30 to 1 that apparently is taught these days. Personally, if someone next to me went into cardiac arrest right now, I would do as my training said and do the 15 to 1 ratio. If I could verify that the American Red Cross teaches otherwise in the Adult CPR course, I would follow those new procedures. However, if the adult CPR course said 15 to one and the CPR for the professional rescuer said 30 to one I would do 15 to mone because I never took a CPR for the professional rescuer course.
That's a joke, right?
Seriously, I could not imagine that it would cost Dell anything... Dell does have to offer source, but they may even charge a small fee for it. Source distribution is NOT an issue.
And be the way, the average user would never realize that he/she is not using Microsoft Office. Yes, many users would, but I wouldn't be sure if the majority would?
It may not have direct monetary costs, but there are opportunity costs. Perhaps there are advantages to the corel office relationship.
Also, it would behoove Dell to mirror the source tarballs as opposed to going through the legal hoopla of having to say, "This is our diff to the source, we signed an agreement with OpenOffice.org to be our upstream provider."
In the corporate world everything has costs, mainly due to lawyers and process control.
The OOo source code set comes to 259MB - thats an extra 259MB Dell has to copy, an extra 259MB that is wasted on the customer hard disk, or 259MB that Dell has to account for in its bandwidth build if it supplies an FTP server.
In short, its an extra hassle that Dell would have to satisfy.
On an 80 gig hard drive that 259 megs is trivial. Considering that the machines are probably RIS installed, the time to copy over another 259 megs is trivial, and dell has the option of putting thes ource on ftp or cd as well.
The average user that would use this, is one that went with the Corel office package previously. So the bottom line question for Dell is how much money they stand to lose for not reselling Corel office, and if they can recover the income lost by not including a demo of Corel Snapfire on new desktops by lets say additional kickback from google if they include picasso as well as the google toolbar.
Re:downmods don't make it any less true
on
ReactOS 0.3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
mod my comments down all you like, but it's a fact that once ReactOS becomes any sort of threat (real or percieved) to Microsoft, Microsoft will break out the lawyers and the software patent lawsuits.
Hide your heads in the sand all you want to...it's your time you're wasting, not mine.
Maybe these people will be able to get jobs as system programmers as a result of this. Maybe they want to see how far they can go before they get sued. Maybe they are hoping that by the time this get to that point the world will be more reverse engineer friendly. Maybe this is just civil disobedience.
In the 70's and 80's UNIX was a product developed by a big company, the phone company to be precise. it has since become an idea replicated many times, always poorly, sometimes less poorly than K&R's implementation. Why can't that happen to windows?
For example, Google's shuttles don't run between 11am and 3:30pm. You have a valid point. However, there is no demand for this for the market eligible for this transportation system. This is also not a very free market. It's a corporate subsidy as opposed to a government subsidy in this case.
However, assuming this grows beyond google, and a few San Fransisco companies get together and form a bus company they could eventually allow the general public to get on the bus if they pay a per ride fare.
Yes I am just speculating here. However, that is what the parent of my original reply was doing.
... there is real mass transit so that companies don't have to invest money in doing this for themselves. This leads me to ask a few rhetorical questions: How long before Google gets together with some of the other tech companies in the area to run a shared service? How long after that before it transforms into the sort of mass transit service that people elsewhere in the world take for granted?
Welcome to the consequences of high-density living. Are you predicting the free market will deliver a better mass transportation system than a government monopoly? Surely you jest? Next you'll suggest private education and people paying for there own healthcare!
Novell is a worthless piece of shit company IMO, but the open source community has no one to blame but themselves for letting that little shit Miguel de Icaza do all of this damage.
You guys threw your little temper-tantrums over Java and now you are paying the price for that stupidity.
And now Java is GPL, so all us C# open source developers go back to writing Java programs. Microsoft knows as long as Mono is playing catchup, it can't attack mono or it will piss of us "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!." If that does happen, there is a perl one liner waiting to be written that will translate all the open source C# code into Java.
What technology do you expect it to be written in then? I see ActiveX, Flash as being the only *real* options for pulling this off. Maybe a Java Applet.
ActiveX and Flash are far from the same thing. The main problems with ActiveX is its windows only and its insecure. You also forget to mention java.
As far as being windows only, Flash and Java have the problem of requiring closed source bytecode interpreters, but run on other platforms. They are both relatively secure as well. Both have interpreters available for linux so you will be able to run this on linux.
I really hope this gets implemented as a J2EE delivered webapp with a flash frontend. Flash has the potential to be a platform of choice for rich web apps, and I think whatever R&D comes out of delivering photoshop as a flash app will translate into newer flash developer tools. I see this as the Flash equivilant of putting a man on the moon in terms of positive side effects.
The algorithm is being released under the GPL ( General Public License ). The algorithm belongs to PhoenixBit and VirusFree
but you may use/modify it freely.
1. You release the code under the GPL, not the algorithm. 2. You don't 'own' the algorithm. You might patent it, but you haven't (and obviously won't since it appears to be radix). Additionally, to GPL the code, you'd have to provide an unlimited redistribution license to the patent if it existed.
Additionally, he should place this sort under the BSD license. At least I would. Something basic like this should be available for closed and open source applications.
We're not paying just for the features - we're paying because retraining our employees on how to use 5-10 open source alternatives (which combined do what one commercial product does) is just too expensive in both time and money.
I'm not saying that these companies couldn't do with some serious humbling on the pricing front, and I agree that a commercial airline-grade price war would be a beautiful thing, but an all-out knock-down drag-out patent war between these huge companies would be devastating to every industry which uses the products that these companies put out.
You paint an extremest picture. Your absolutely right in terms of existing software. There is no point is setting up evolution when your exchange server works fine. That same logic accounts for mainframes running COBOL code. The code works fine and there is little realized benefit for rewriting it. The "bad" migrstions to windows I've been involved in are the ones where an office's main application used to be an AIX or SCO terminal based application, and that gets switched over to a windows system. The lesson I've learned is that change has an intrinsic cost that can be quantified in man hours and that contributes to TCO.
However, open source is a great idea in terms of implementing new features. If you are stepping up from FileMaker or Microsoft Access, migrating to Postgresql will take about as much time as Microsoft SQL server. If you are a law firm where your employees have more meetings with clients than coworkers, squirrel mail and phpcalendar might be a better choice for you.
As far as it taking 5-10 open source applications to replace one commercial one, can you cite specific examples. Redhat comes with LDAP support, you simply need to enable it. The only example I can think of is replacing exchange. Yes I would need to install a pop, imap, smtp, webmail, and calendar app to replace it. However, I can't get a "pop and smtp only" exchange license if all I want to do is give out pop accounts.
If you don't believe in UI standards try using blender, it will make you a believer. Blender makes both Word Perfect and Autocad for DOS look intuitive and easy to learn in comparison. Sure if it's the only app you use you eventually get used to it.
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was a well designed piece of software. Like VI, if you took the time to learn it you were very productive in it.
Much as I'd like to respond to your... points, I can see, based on your general thought process, why DB plans appeal to you, and why further comments would be fruitless.
Because it bother you that I would willingly and knowingly to enslave myself to an employer.
I can understand why someone would want to work for a company for his lifetime. I cannot understand why someone would want to have the option of leaving severely punished so that his employer can treat him like dirt as his magic year approaches.
Well you have multiple sources of retirement income. You have you DB pension that is an all or nothing deal. Either the money is there and you get your defined benefit or its not and you get jack. Perhaps the odds have gotten worse, but its till more than likely that if you stick it out 19 years you wont be fired on your 20th. You then get IRAs or if your savvy you invest yourself.
I feel bad for people who find a company that's worth spending 20 years working for, yet has to fill out the 401k paperwork every year.
Yeah, I'm sorry that responsibility for your own life comes with so much of that dreaded paperwork. The lifetime paperwork involved in 401k plans is probably 1/20th of a mortgage application, but I guess the later is different because that's "the American way".
Exactly. I elect to get a mortgage or rent. Its my choice. Its not what my employer offers. With a 401k I am being forced to make my own choice. What I want is the choice of both. I want a company that give me a choice between the 401k or the DB.
I seriously don't understand why people make this an age issue, and COMPLETELY ignore the whole pension system that set up such skewed incentives. Why do people love these defined benefit pensions so much, even though they give the employer the power to fire you to dodge paying benefits? That just means you're chained to your job. And conversely, if there's some safeguard to keep you from being fired for this reason, why would anyone want to hire you, when they're basically agreeing to extremely expensive arbitration?
You miss the advantage of DB pensions, the defined benefit. If I make it 20 years, I won. Now, I would want to be working for something as huge and conservative as IBM to know that my company won't be bought out and my pension fund raided, but that is a side issue.
Incidentally, I've never understood why pension plans are so ignorant of the concept of "time value of money". I found a pension plan summary from 1990 for Chrysler at my workplace a few months ago. (Chrysler used to own the facility.) It made pension benefits depend solely on final average salary and years with the company. That basically means that if you work there from ages 25-35, or 55-65, you get the same fraction of your salary as pension at 65, even even though the benefit for the younger worker is far less expensive. Why would you offer such a plan unless you were expecting to bind someone to you for the rest of their working years?
That is how society worked years ago. People got a job and kept it for 20 years. I think we should go back to doing that. Find a good company and stick with it for a lifetime. Unfortunately, few companies are worth sticking with for 20 years these days.
I feel bad for people who got suckered into DB plans, of course, but please, don't pretend there's any hatred for old people behind this.
I feel bad for people who find a company that's worth spending 20 years working for, yet has to fill out the 401k paperwork every year. Yes this is America, and we all want choices, but some people want to be told what to do for 20 years. That's not a bad thing necessarily.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it shows that (big companies != innovation). Big Box retail is profitable by following the formula.
Also, small companies are not necessarily better at innovation. A one storefront company would probably go out of business in the face of outside disruptive innovations, E-Commerce in this case. Those that survive probably didn't need to adapt, e.g. boutique shops whose original formula stressed customer service, etc.
(On another note, how would you propose to punish people under the age of 18 who attempt to kill themselves?)
On second though those that "attempt" suicide are looking for attention. So if you make the punishment for attempted suicide capital punishment, that gets rid of annoying people while not punishing people who genuinely want to kill themselves but are to stupid to.
Beer and (another addictive, carcinogenic plant:) tobacco are not safer. They should be restricted More, and that's gradually happening to smokers, worldwide.
Just what are you suggesting we do about the problem with drug abuse and addiction?
People should be allowed to do harm to themselves. People should be allowed to smoke in public. The government should not interfere. Now if a corporation wants to not hire people that smoke or drink, that is perfectly ok. If the government want to outlaw drunk driving, that is ok because you are causing great immediate harm. You don't have to go to the bar, and walking past someone smoking a cigarette will not cause significant harm. (Attempted) suicide should not be a crime for people over the age of 18
I currently don't have health insurance because I quite my corporate job to be a contractor for a few months. If I got injured, and die due to lack of medical care, I deserve to die. I never finished college. If no one will hire me as a result, I deserve to literally starve to death. I would accept private charity, but would chose death over welfare. I drink and occasionally smoke cigars. I will not blame anyone for liver cancer.
The government needs to not deal with these problems. Private charities should. If charities can not raise enough money to help you, you do not deserve help. I am being callous here, but it is necessary to keep the government small.
The accusations are untrue. However it was a popular urban legend. A debunking of the list is available here. I never believed he killed any of those people. My only point in making the statement was I don't think Bush has ever been accused of having someone shot, except of course as a matter of war. Clinton has, although unjustly. However, accepting an urban legend as true, is better than making up some baseless accusation.
Now I could be wrong, there could have been rumors of mysterious deaths related to Bush, but I've yet to hear them.
Uh, Clinton was the one who's political enemies had a tendency to die mysteriously. You may accuse Bush of being a war monger, and even big brother, but he's not one to have domestic political enemies shot.
It seems like the person likes many facets of IT and his problem is what to specialize in. How would entering another field, expanding his choices, be a good thing?
Of course, considering your lack of direction, you may not be the best person to run a business. Perhaps you should stick to help desk.Some people are really bad with coming up with an original idea, but if given a task clear but broad task like "Write a Wiki like system that the outlook and excel crowd would use." can come up with a proposal, and given proper manpower and budget, can pull the task off. Then again, some people have a million great ideas but can't make them happen. Thats why a company should have a captain and a helmsman. Someone should say, "Set course for ". . . Engage", and someone should else should chart the course.
Let's just say... it just oozes professionalism. And seems to have nothing to do with Microsoft
http://stacymunn.com
That appears to be the designer.
I know you're joking, but this comment is also in response to the "Won't dogs get cancer sniffing chemicals?" question. The dogs take in the same amount of particles no matter what they trained to detect. Imagine them like a vacuum cleaner that picks up every scent that every bag gives off. They are trained to notice certain smells, but they inhale everything equally. Bomb sniffing dogs were inhaling drugs long before they were trained to detect them, and both drug and bomb dogs have been inhaling these chemicals since they were put in action.
So are veterinarians on Slashdot able to answer this? In general, do airport dogs, or any other group of law enforcement trained scent finding dogs, tend to get different sicknesses than the general population of dogs of the same breed? I would think that state and municipal dogs tend to get more variety in their environment. Howerver, dogs assigned to railroad and airport security details tend to breath air from the same mostly closed system day in and day out. If they tend to get lung cancer or other diseases, it might indicate airports and train stations are not healthy places to work either.
When I think about CS I think about things like microkernels or clockless processor architectures (although the latter is partly electronics of course). So I was wondering what examples others could come up with.
A real computer scientist would never write in anything less portable than a number 2 pencil. I'm sure you've heard that before. The saying implies that computer scientists are just mathematicians that use computers to model there data.
Did you ever think the red cross was deciding whether or not this study had merit. The people that take CPR have a minimal of medical training. Literally, a couple of hours. They,including myself, should probably due as their training said and stick to the 15 to 1 comporession to breathing ratio or the 30 to 1 that apparently is taught these days. Personally, if someone next to me went into cardiac arrest right now, I would do as my training said and do the 15 to 1 ratio. If I could verify that the American Red Cross teaches otherwise in the Adult CPR course, I would follow those new procedures. However, if the adult CPR course said 15 to one and the CPR for the professional rescuer said 30 to one I would do 15 to mone because I never took a CPR for the professional rescuer course.
It may not have direct monetary costs, but there are opportunity costs. Perhaps there are advantages to the corel office relationship.
Also, it would behoove Dell to mirror the source tarballs as opposed to going through the legal hoopla of having to say, "This is our diff to the source, we signed an agreement with OpenOffice.org to be our upstream provider."
In the corporate world everything has costs, mainly due to lawyers and process control.
In short, its an extra hassle that Dell would have to satisfy.
On an 80 gig hard drive that 259 megs is trivial. Considering that the machines are probably RIS installed, the time to copy over another 259 megs is trivial, and dell has the option of putting thes ource on ftp or cd as well.
The average user that would use this, is one that went with the Corel office package previously. So the bottom line question for Dell is how much money they stand to lose for not reselling Corel office, and if they can recover the income lost by not including a demo of Corel Snapfire on new desktops by lets say additional kickback from google if they include picasso as well as the google toolbar.
Hide your heads in the sand all you want to...it's your time you're wasting, not mine.
Maybe these people will be able to get jobs as system programmers as a result of this. Maybe they want to see how far they can go before they get sued. Maybe they are hoping that by the time this get to that point the world will be more reverse engineer friendly. Maybe this is just civil disobedience.
In the 70's and 80's UNIX was a product developed by a big company, the phone company to be precise. it has since become an idea replicated many times, always poorly, sometimes less poorly than K&R's implementation. Why can't that happen to windows?
For example, Google's shuttles don't run between 11am and 3:30pm. You have a valid point. However, there is no demand for this for the market eligible for this transportation system. This is also not a very free market. It's a corporate subsidy as opposed to a government subsidy in this case.
However, assuming this grows beyond google, and a few San Fransisco companies get together and form a bus company they could eventually allow the general public to get on the bus if they pay a per ride fare.
Yes I am just speculating here. However, that is what the parent of my original reply was doing.
... there is real mass transit so that companies don't have to invest money in doing this for themselves. This leads me to ask a few rhetorical questions: How long before Google gets together with some of the other tech companies in the area to run a shared service? How long after that before it transforms into the sort of mass transit service that people elsewhere in the world take for granted?Welcome to the consequences of high-density living. Are you predicting the free market will deliver a better mass transportation system than a government monopoly? Surely you jest? Next you'll suggest private education and people paying for there own healthcare!
http://www.bookendzdocks.com/Products.html
You guys threw your little temper-tantrums over Java and now you are paying the price for that stupidity.
And now Java is GPL, so all us C# open source developers go back to writing Java programs. Microsoft knows as long as Mono is playing catchup, it can't attack mono or it will piss of us "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!." If that does happen, there is a perl one liner waiting to be written that will translate all the open source C# code into Java.
ActiveX and Flash are far from the same thing. The main problems with ActiveX is its windows only and its insecure. You also forget to mention java.
As far as being windows only, Flash and Java have the problem of requiring closed source bytecode interpreters, but run on other platforms. They are both relatively secure as well. Both have interpreters available for linux so you will be able to run this on linux.
I really hope this gets implemented as a J2EE delivered webapp with a flash frontend. Flash has the potential to be a platform of choice for rich web apps, and I think whatever R&D comes out of delivering photoshop as a flash app will translate into newer flash developer tools. I see this as the Flash equivilant of putting a man on the moon in terms of positive side effects.
1. You release the code under the GPL, not the algorithm. 2. You don't 'own' the algorithm. You might patent it, but you haven't (and obviously won't since it appears to be radix). Additionally, to GPL the code, you'd have to provide an unlimited redistribution license to the patent if it existed.
Additionally, he should place this sort under the BSD license. At least I would. Something basic like this should be available for closed and open source applications.
You paint an extremest picture. Your absolutely right in terms of existing software. There is no point is setting up evolution when your exchange server works fine. That same logic accounts for mainframes running COBOL code. The code works fine and there is little realized benefit for rewriting it. The "bad" migrstions to windows I've been involved in are the ones where an office's main application used to be an AIX or SCO terminal based application, and that gets switched over to a windows system. The lesson I've learned is that change has an intrinsic cost that can be quantified in man hours and that contributes to TCO.
However, open source is a great idea in terms of implementing new features. If you are stepping up from FileMaker or Microsoft Access, migrating to Postgresql will take about as much time as Microsoft SQL server. If you are a law firm where your employees have more meetings with clients than coworkers, squirrel mail and phpcalendar might be a better choice for you.
As far as it taking 5-10 open source applications to replace one commercial one, can you cite specific examples. Redhat comes with LDAP support, you simply need to enable it. The only example I can think of is replacing exchange. Yes I would need to install a pop, imap, smtp, webmail, and calendar app to replace it. However, I can't get a "pop and smtp only" exchange license if all I want to do is give out pop accounts.
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was a well designed piece of software. Like VI, if you took the time to learn it you were very productive in it.
Because it bother you that I would willingly and knowingly to enslave myself to an employer.
Well you have multiple sources of retirement income. You have you DB pension that is an all or nothing deal. Either the money is there and you get your defined benefit or its not and you get jack. Perhaps the odds have gotten worse, but its till more than likely that if you stick it out 19 years you wont be fired on your 20th. You then get IRAs or if your savvy you invest yourself. I feel bad for people who find a company that's worth spending 20 years working for, yet has to fill out the 401k paperwork every year.
Yeah, I'm sorry that responsibility for your own life comes with so much of that dreaded paperwork. The lifetime paperwork involved in 401k plans is probably 1/20th of a mortgage application, but I guess the later is different because that's "the American way".
Exactly. I elect to get a mortgage or rent. Its my choice. Its not what my employer offers. With a 401k I am being forced to make my own choice. What I want is the choice of both. I want a company that give me a choice between the 401k or the DB.
Nature made him strong already, nurture him to be smart.
You miss the advantage of DB pensions, the defined benefit. If I make it 20 years, I won. Now, I would want to be working for something as huge and conservative as IBM to know that my company won't be bought out and my pension fund raided, but that is a side issue.
Incidentally, I've never understood why pension plans are so ignorant of the concept of "time value of money". I found a pension plan summary from 1990 for Chrysler at my workplace a few months ago. (Chrysler used to own the facility.) It made pension benefits depend solely on final average salary and years with the company. That basically means that if you work there from ages 25-35, or 55-65, you get the same fraction of your salary as pension at 65, even even though the benefit for the younger worker is far less expensive. Why would you offer such a plan unless you were expecting to bind someone to you for the rest of their working years?
That is how society worked years ago. People got a job and kept it for 20 years. I think we should go back to doing that. Find a good company and stick with it for a lifetime. Unfortunately, few companies are worth sticking with for 20 years these days.
I feel bad for people who got suckered into DB plans, of course, but please, don't pretend there's any hatred for old people behind this.
I feel bad for people who find a company that's worth spending 20 years working for, yet has to fill out the 401k paperwork every year. Yes this is America, and we all want choices, but some people want to be told what to do for 20 years. That's not a bad thing necessarily.